Mars Habs and Anthropology

One strand of emergent anthropology that I've been following over the years has been the "anthropology of outer spaces,"  one recently given new life by a few anthropologists, Deborah Battaglia and David Valentine among them, who have begun to theorize space not just as shadow of terrestrial geo-politics, but as "reconstituting humanness and human sociality in the here and now" (Valentine, Olson and Battaglia 2009: 11).

Space is one of the paramount sites for the legitimation of Western configurations of power/knowledge.  The kinds of futures people ascribe to space--e.g., the military-technocratic order of Star Trek: the Next Generation--have a lot to do with the apotheosis of colonialism under the auspices of neo-liberal capitalism (Kilgore 2005).  But there are different possibilities as well--as Vaelntine et al point out.

But some of these possible, alternative futures are happening right here, in the form of Mars simulations placing groups of scientist-volunteers in a "hab" environment for long periods of time (from a few weeks to, in the case of the ongoing Russia/ ESA project, a few months), during which communications with the Earth are severely truncated and people should "suit up" before going outside, etc.  Sure, as Valentine et al point, only 500 people may have inhabited space, but how many thousands more have enacted life in outer spaces?  

The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) has been around for some time--since 2002, and has been joined by other habs as part of the Mars Analog Research Station (MARS) project.   Over the last 7 seasons, teams have gone to the station, simkulated their Mars colony, and posted lots of repoprts and updates.  Lots of these present and former para-astronauts have left behind their blogs--"Mars, ho!".

OK--some of this looks an awful lot like those dismal Star Trek futures, but there are occasionally intimations of sometghing else.  Together, all of these records, journals and reports suggest other possibilities--challenges to race, gender and class.  Possibilities for a playful and emancipatory outer space. 

References

 Kilgore, De Witt Douglas (2003).  Astrofuturism.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. 

Valentine, David, Valerie Olson and Debbora Battaglia (2009).  "Encountering the Future."  Anthropology News: December, pp. 11+. 

Previewing Post-Capitalism

How many books are there (in anthropology and elsewhere) describing/advocating/conjuring up "post-socialism"? I'm looking at one right now entitled, appropriately enough, "Post-Socialism" by Maruska Svasek (Berghahn Books, 2006). But, as lay-offs continue and plans to nationalize industries multiply, where are the texts on "post-capitalism"? I don't know about you, but it's sent me scurrying to my bookshelf to re-read my Kim Stanley Robinson! For most, "post-capitalism" refers to a miscellaneous theories for either "next" stages (a la Drucker), or alternatives to corporate capitalism (like various tracts on "participatory" economies). But perhaps the more anthropological take on this would be an economy of "shreds and patches" (to commit unspeakable violence to Robert Lowie) made up of the residue of dominant capitalism together with a thousand heterogeneous practices that make up the barely sublimated unconscious of economic life--in short, just the sort of bricolage that anthroplogists explicate every day in the lives of actual people who find themselves on the receiving end of IMF structural adjustments and other forms of economic violence.

This is the kind of post-capitalism I'd like to see elaborated, and, despite Robinson's own penchant for utopian system-building, not far off from what he does in the Mars triology, which--in a kind of Baconian way--takes the kinds of reciprocities and exchanges common to scientific communities as a starting point for a Martian economy.